In 1791, when our founders adopted
the First Amendment, every single state had a law against
blasphemy on the books. Ten of the original thirteen states had
officially established religions. They intended
the Amendment to protect state and local autonomy in religious matters from federal
interference. That's why it begins, "Congress shall
make no law . . ." It never occurred to our founders
that the Supreme Court might gradually usurp Congress's most important law making powers [1].

The fact that the founders intended the First Amendment to restrict only the federal government is beyond
dispute. The Marshall Court admitted it (unanimously) in 1833. The name of the case was Barron v.
Baltimore.
In 1833, the justices knew that the truth about the origins of
the Bill-of-Rights was still fresh in our collective memory. The
kind of deceptions our judicial employees get away with now would have
been political suicide back then.

Around 1940, about 150 years after
we adopted the First Amendment and 70 years after we adopted the
14th, the Supreme Court started using the substantive due process scam
to create a bogus new First Amendment out of whole cloth.
The Court asserted that the due process clause of the 14th
Amendment made states, cities, towns, villages, and public
schools subject to the Bill of Rights. The justices also
claimed that the due process clause empowered the Court to "evolve" the Bill of
Rights, from time to time, so it would better conform to the
judges' notions about "fundamental law" [2].

That claim was at best preposterous and
at worst comical. When the 14th Amendment was adopted, shortly
after the Civil War, the Supreme Court was viewed with great distrust
by the public and the congressional majority. In designing the
Amendment, its framers took pains to avoid trusting the Court with
power to enforce it; they didn't want to rely on an institution then
viewed as "a diseased member of the body politic" that probably
deserved "amputation." So they included Section 5 which
explicitely assigned enforcement power to "Congress" [3].

Contemporaneous with the adoption of the
14th Amendment, Congress passed four Enforcement Acts as the
Amendment's Section 5 expressly authorized and implicitely
promised. Those four Acts, which in total ran to over 8000 words,
described in detail everything that Congress intended the 14th
Amendment to include. There was not a word about religion; there
was not a word about separation of church and state; there was not a
word about incorporating the First Amendment or any part of the Bill of
Rights against the states. There was not even a smidgeon of a hint
about authorizing our judicial employees to invent a mountain of new
content in our centuries-old right to "due process of law." So
the Supreme Court's claimed power to enforce its own revised version of
the First Amendment against the States is, to put it kindly, without
foundation [4].

To put it more plainly, the claim is a brazen fraud.
In 1876, a scant eight years after the 14th Amendment was
ratified, Congress debated a proposed constitutional amendment to
impose the substance of the First Amendment on the states. The
proposed "Blaine Amendment" said,

No State shall make any law respecting an establishment
of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; and no money
raised by taxation in any State, for the support of public schools, or
derived from any public fund therefor, nor any public lands devoted
thereto, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect, nor
shall any money so raised, or lands so devoted be divided between
religious sects or denominations.

The "Blaine Amendment" had a fair amount of support.
It passed in the House with 180 yeas, 7 nays, and 98 not voting.
It failed narrowly in the Senate with 28 yeas, 16 nays, and 27
not voting. In roughly the same time frame many of the states
placed similar language in their own constitutions. So it's clear
that the idea of inposing First Amendment principles on the states was
popular at the time. It's also clear that the 14th Amendment was
not intended to "incorporate" the First Amendment against the states.
Many of the Congressmen who voted to adopt the 14th Amendment
were still around in 1876 to debate and vote on the Blaine Amendment.
They would certainly remember what they had done, and intended,
eight years earlier [5].

SNEAKING LIKE A THIEF, OVER THE FIELD OF JURISDICTION

In the majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), Justice Hugo Black, who had spent
his formative years in the Ku Klux Klan, wrote,

In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect "a wall of separation between
church and State."

Thomas Jefferson, and his statement misrepresented by Justice Black, had nothing to do with the Constitution. The
statement was included in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, which was written in 1802, more than a decade after the First Amendment was
ratified. In September of 1798, when the First Amendment was proposed by Congress, Jefferson was serving as Minister to France.
When the amendment was ratified in 1791, Jefferson was Secretary of State and a non-participant. Finally, when the 14th Amendment,
which our unfaithful judicial employees claim "incorporated" the First Amendment against the states, was adopted, Jefferson was long dead.
If everything ever written by Thomas Jefferson is to be taken as part of the Constitution, how about the following passage from his 1821
letter to Charles Hammond: [6]

(The) federal judiciary (is) an irresponsible body (for impeachment is scarcely a scarecrow) working like gravity by night and by day,
gaining a little today and little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction . . .

Our federal judiciary has been "advancing it noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction" for two centuries. It has
finally stolen the most important "legislative Powers" our founders assigned to "Congress." That is a crime against Congress, the
Constitution, and "We the People," the Court's masters. Unfortunately, "We the People" have no good way to prevent or punish this
crime. Throughout our history, Congress has showed itself unwilling, or unable, to defend the Constitution against a renegade Court.

Now it's time to share another dirty little secret. Federal courts have not only
trashed the First Amendment by restricting our free exercise of religion, they've also trashed it by establishing an official
federal government religion. Legal scholars and historians have been bragging about this for more than a century.

The substance of their boasts can be summarized more
or less as follows. America's dominant religion is now a "secular"
religion. The Supreme Court is its papacy. The bogus
constitution that the Court made up over the years is its bible; the
real Constitution, the one that begins "We The People," has been
degraded to the status of an empty symbol. It fills the need of
the unsophisticated masses to venerate something. Lawyers and
judges are the secular religion's priests and Supreme Court justices
are its high priests [7].

Law professor A. S. Miller, for example, refers to
the Supreme Court Building as "The Temple on the Hill" and the Court
itself as a "theological institution." He characterizes as
"sacred documents" the bogus constitution that the Court made up.
Miller refers to the justices as "High Priests," and points out
that the "Court cannot be understood apart from its religious aspects"
[8].

Professor Miller also quotes fellow legal scholars
who assert that the justices are "brushed with divinity," and refer to
lawyers as a "priestly tribe" which defends "this Arc of the Covenant
(the bogus constitution)" against the "profane touch" of "open and
covert foes" (presumably "We the People") [9].

Constitutional law literature is loaded with such
quotes, Miller's book is only one of the richer sources. In 1880,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, a legal deep thinker of the time, wrote an
article in which he referred to the Dean of Harvard Law school as "the
greatest living legal theologian." Friends of the Supreme Court
have called it the "secular papacy" [10].

AN ECCLESIASTICAL PRINCIPALITY

As far as I know, it was first pointed out in The Temple of Karnak that actions of our Supreme Court can usually
be understood by studying Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince.
One lesson it taught stood out from all the others. That
lesson concerned the most reliable way for a "Prince" to secure his
power.
He should establish and maintain an "Ecclesiastical
Principality." He should set up a state in which the ruler enjoys
the protection of an official religion. I've copied a translation
of a Machiavelli quote, on the subject, into the Notes & Citations
Section below [11].

In medieval England, the birth place of America's
legal tradition, the rulers understood Machiavelli's lessons even
before he did. English kings ruled by "divine right." They
were the anointed of God. If you didn't obey them, you were going
to hell. You were going to hell after they cut off your head, of
course [11].

English common law judges were agents of the
king. So they also claimed to speak for God. This was a
basic part of their act. They took on the trappings of
priests. They dressed in robes, practiced rituals, and did
business in Latin. Judges in England's American colonies followed
suit.

After America became independent, our Supreme Court
still claimed to speak for God's law; it just didn't mention God.
It justified constitutionally unfounded decisions by reference to
"natural law" or "fundamental law." The justices claimed that
they spoke for law that was "sacred" or law that existed before the
Constitution and even before "society" [12].

The "secular
papacy" tries to avoid making its game too obvious.
The justices never say that God comes down to give them
instructions at 3:00 every afternoon. They also never say,
"listen up, this is your god speaking." That
would be much too clumsy. Instead they say that they have
"discovered" what "fundamental law" says
about the issue in question.

Once in a while the Court slips up and blows its
cover. During the Vietnam war
years, it laid down rules for use in deciding what is, or isn't, a
religion. Congress had passed a law which allowed
concientious objectors to avoid serving in the military. The law
said that folks who believed
that all war was sinful, didn't have to serve. But the basis of
their belief had to be a religion. The Act in question exempted
from

"combatant training and service
. . . any person . . . who, by reason of religious training and belief,
is conscientiously opposed to participation in war in any form.
Religious training and belief in this connection means an
individual's belief in a relation to a Supreme Being involving duties
superior to those arising from any human relation, but does not include
essentially political, sociological, or philosophical views or a merely
personal moral code."

Some men, who
admitted that they did not believe in God, demanded to escape the draft
under those laws anyway. The draft boards didn't buy it. So
the men sued in federal court. They said that a draft exemption
based on "religion" violated the First Amendment, an entirely
reasonable claim [13].

Several cases got to the Supreme Court which, at that
time, was very liberal. The justices, therefore, wanted to find a
way to let the draft dodgers off the hook. If they just agreed
that the law violated the First Amendment nobody would be able to use
it to escape military service. That was not the policy outcome
they wanted. So they declared that the law was constitutional;
but they revised it. They said that a "religion" did not have to
include belief in God, or prayer, or any of the usual things. In
1965, in Seeger v. United States, the Supreme Court
ruled that a religion was any "sincere and meaningful belief which
occupies in the life of its possessor a place parallel to that filled
by the God of those admittedly qualifying for the (draft) exemption"
[14].

In 1970, in Welsh v. United States, the
Court opined that you could have a religion without even calling it a
religion. On that occasion your judicial employees said [13]

In view of the broad scope of the word "religious," a
registrant's characterization of his beliefs as "nonreligious" is not a
reliable guide to those administering the (draft) exemption.

To be sure, the definition of "religion" given in
those two opinions was not the one clearly spelled out in the Act. So
the opinions were fraudulent. However, that definition is really quite close to the
thinking of academic experts on religion. Experts say, for
example, that a religion is any "total commitment to an all-embracing
group goal . . . an ultimate concern" [15].

What does a typical Supreme Court justice view as "an
ultimate concern"? What are his most "sincere and meaningful"
beliefs? His most sincere and meaningful beliefs include the
sacred status of judicial power. They include the doctrine of
stare decisis. They include the contents of the bogus
constitution that courts have made up over the years.

Those are exactly the kinds of beliefs the Court defined as constituting a religion in United States v. Seeger and
Welsh v. United States.
Those are also the kinds of beliefs that academic experts in the
field define as religion. Your judicial employees have long been imposing
those religious doctrines on all Americans while restricting our free
practice of religions that compete with theirs.

So your judicial employees are condemned by their own words; they're trashing the First Amendment big time.

THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS OF ACLUISM

As shown above, our judicial branch of government has
been running a religious institution since colonial times.
However, the tenets of that religion don't remain the same, they
evolve over time in in keeping with the religious bias of the Court
majority. That's what liberal law professers mean when they tell
us that the Constitution "evolves" [16].

For the last half-century or so the Court's primary
religious bias has followed the doctrines of the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU), a religious organization if ever there was one.
Since the Court's supporters could never admit that the justices
are fronting for a Godless religion, they can't call their sect by a
religious name, i. e. one that ends in "ism." Fortunately, a
thoughtful observer of religious cults made up a proper name for it.
The author of a recent book conferred the name "Acluism" on the
"secular religion" currently favored by our judicial employees [17].

Like those of our traditional Christian
religions, the central ideas of Acluism can be summarized in two great
commandments. But they're a lot different than the two Great
Commandments given in Matthew, Chapter 22. They're not
publicized in any ACLU documents; but they can easily be discovered by a careful
study of ACLU policies:

I. If there is a God, he'd better not show his face around here.

II. Thou shalt punish the innocent and reward the guilty [18].

NOTES & CITATIONS

1. A description of state laws against
blasphemy that were in force in 1791 can be found in Saunders, pages
90-98. See also Lusky (1975) page 168. The Supreme Court's usurpation of legislative power is described in some length in the book,
Grand Larceny: An Unexpurgated History of the Supreme Court.

2. I'm indebted to David W. New for pointing
out that the seminal case for this line of fraudulent Supreme Court
jurisprudence was Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940).
Mr. New's analysis of the case can be found at
http://www.faithandaction.org/DavidNewOctoberNovember05.htm. The
substantive due process scam is described in the online essays A Scam is Born and Evolution of a Scam. The claim that out Constitution evolves to conform to Supreme
Court policy innovations is critiqued in Our Evolving Constitution

4. A transcription of the four Enforcement Acts can be found on the Internet at http://ttokarnak.home.att.net/14AEActs.html.
It's worth noting that the Supreme Court, during the
post-Civil-War years, found various pretexts with which to nullify most
of the enforcement legislation embodied in the four Acts. As a
result, African American citizens were deprived of the federal
protection the 14th Amendment was intended to provide. The
Supreme Court deserves most of the blame for
three-quarters-of-a-century of Ku Klux Klan outrages and Jim Crow laws in parts of the South.

See the University of Minnesota Law School web page concerning the proposed Blaine Amendment.

6. A transcript of the Everson opinion can be found here. A transcript of Jefferson's letter to the Danbury
Baptist association can be found on the Internet, as can a transcript of his 1821 letter
to Charles Hammond. A facsimile of the Hammond letter can be
found at a Library of Congress web site.

7. See, for example, Levinson (1988), who cites many earlier works on the
subject. See also Miller (Arthur S., 1982).

8. See Miller (A. S. 1982), pages 1, 10, 19, and 20.

9 See Miller (A. S. 1982), pages 20 and 78.

10. The Oliver Wendell Holmes quote is from Glendon,
1994, page 186. Daniel Boorstin used the term "secular papacy" in
the forward to Professor McCloskey's famous book, The American Supreme Court.

" . . .they (ecclesiastical
principalities) are gained either by fortune or virtue, but kept
without either, being supported by ancient statutes universally
received in the Christian Church, which are of such power and authority
they do keep their prince in his dignity, let his conversation or
conduct be what it will".

12. These quotes were taken from Konefsky, pages 131
and 142. Konefsky attributes the first ("most sacred" legal
principles) to a biography of Marshall by Justice Joseph
Story. He attributes the second (laws that existed before
society) to the majority opinion in Sturges v. Crowninshield, (1819).

13. This passage is quoted from the Supreme Court opinion in Welsh v. United States. See also
Seeley, pages 54 and 55 and Schwartz (Bernard, 1983), pages 570-72.